Improvisation and Music Education

Beyond the Classroom

Ajay Heble, Mark Laver, Ajay Heble, Mark Laver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317569923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teoria e gusto musicale

This book offers compelling new perspectives on the revolutionary potential of improvisation pedagogy. Bringing together contributions from leading musicians, scholars, and teachers from around the world, the volume articulates how improvisation can breathe new life into old curricula; how it can help teachers and students to communicate more effectively; how it can break down damaging ideological boundaries between classrooms and communities; and how it can help students become more thoughtful, engaged, and activist global citizens. In the last two decades, a growing number of music educators, music education researchers, musicologists, cultural theorists, creative practitioners, and ethnomusicologists have suggested that a greater emphasis on improvisation in music performance, history, and theory classes offers enormous potential for pedagogical enrichment. This book will help educators realize that potential by exploring improvisation along a variety of trajectories. Essays offer readers both theoretical explorations of improvisation and music education from a wide array of vantage points, and practical explanations of how the theory can be implemented in real situations in communities and classrooms. It will therefore be of interest to teachers and students in numerous modes of pedagogy and fields of study, as well as students and faculty in the academic fields of music education, jazz studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.

1 Introduction

Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom

Ajay Heble and Mark Laver

What does it mean to teach improvisation? Can the skills required to participate in a mode of music making that, at least in its most provocative historical instances, has sought to accent and embody real-time creative decision making, risk taking, interaction, adaptation, surprise, and responsiveness be effectively conveyed in a classroom or in a university? Is improvisation a practice that is best understood as being “learned but not taught,” as Patricia Shehan Campbell asks, “or can it be facilitated by a teacher?”¹ And what happens when improvisation gets institutionalized in an academic setting? Does it run the risk of losing what many see as its critical and creative edge, its transformational capacity, the very force of its out-of-tuneness? In his important essay, “Teaching Improvised Music: An Ethnographic Memoir,” George Lewis suggests, indeed, that “a good way to start a heated debate among experienced improvisors is to pose the question of whether improvisation ‘can be taught’—a question which, as often as not, refers to the kind of pedagogy associated with schools.”² Lewis continues: “As the study of improvisative modes of musicality, regardless of tradition, has begun to assume a greater role in the music departments of a number of major institutions of higher learning, it is to be expected that the nature, necessity, and eventual function of such pedagogy would be scrutinized—and eventually contested—from a variety of standpoints, both inside and outside the academy.”³

Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom seeks to intervene in such debates by offering compelling new perspectives on the revolutionary potential of improvisation pedagogy. Bringing together contributions from leading musicians, scholars, and teachers, the book shows us how improvisation can breathe new life into old curricula; how it can help teachers and students to communicate more effectively; how it can break down damaging ideological boundaries between classrooms and communities; and how it can help students become more thoughtful, engaged, and activist global citizens.

Improvisation has long been an uncomfortable subject for music educators. In a curricular and pedagogical paradigm that often hinges primarily on music notation—a paradigm where performance classes have historically emphasized reading and writing music, and history classes so often characterize music history as an evolving sequence of notated musical texts—improvisation has often been disparaged, devalued, and treated as an afterthought, if not entirely ignored. In the last two decades, however, a growing number of music educators, music education researchers, musicologists, cultural theorists, creative practitioners, and ethnomusicologists have suggested that a greater emphasis on improvisation in music performance, history, and theory classes, as well as within the context of broader community settings, offers enormous potential for pedagogical enrichment along a number of trajectories.

First, as a curricular focus, as Gabriel Solis suggests, improvisation offers a “way out” of the ossified logocentric canons and hierarchies that have long structured music education.⁴ When we conceive of “musical works” not as fixed texts but as improvisatory musical processes and continuities that are forever in flux—if we heed Christopher Small’s call to reconceive of music as a lived process that is radically contingent upon the real world experiences of the participants⁵—we can begin to imagine new critically reflexive possibilities for music theory and historiography that deconstruct the hegemony of “great composers” and their “great works.”

Second, as a pedagogical method, improvisation invites educators to “deterritorialize the classroom.”⁶ Following the scholarship-cum-advocacy of critical pedagogues like Paulo Freire and bell hooks, improvisation as a pedagogical heuristic demands that music teachers recognize the intrinsic dynamism and fluidity of knowledge, and calls on teachers to conceive of their work as a critical dialogue with their students rather than a simple transfer (or what Freire famously termed “banking”) of a fixed pool of information.⁷

Finally, improvisation can teach a critical acuity and an ethic of deep empathy toward alternative voices that has the potential to empower students, help them develop greater socio-critical awareness, and inculcate a sense of human empathy and obligation. Indeed, many pedagogues engaging with improvisatory methodologies search for ways to bring learning outside of the classroom by developing applied research projects that bring students (as well as educators) into contact with marginalized and aggrieved communities. For these teachers and scholars, improvisational pedagogies demand engagement with communities outside of the traditional sites of institutionalized education.

Recognizing its potential to enrich music education, a rapidly growing number of state and provincial governments across the U.S. and Canada have made improvisation a mandatory part of elementary and high school music curricula, particularly since the mid-1990s. However, according to numerous anecdotal reports from music educators, many teachers continue to neglect improvisation in their classrooms. This neglect appears to be the result of three principal factors. First, relatively few teachers have engaged seriously with improvisation themselves in the course of their own training, and are consequently inadequately equipped to teach their students how to improvise. Second, there is a real paucity of methodological literature that addresses improvisation in music education; hence, even those teachers who are driven to incorporate improvisation into their curricula in a meaningful way have only limited resources upon which they can draw. Third, many teachers remain skeptical of improvisation both as a curricular focus and as a pedagogical heuristic in large part because little work has been done to evaluate the impact of improvisation in the classroom.

Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom is designed to address these three lacunae by offering readers both theoretical explorations of improvisation and music education from a wide array of vantage points, and practical explanations of how the theory can be implemented in real situations in communities and classrooms. The book opens with “Teaching Improvisation,” a section that addresses the challenges and rewards of introducing improvisation-oriented performance classes in a variety of institutional contexts. From empowering students to take charge of their own learning, to offering students ways to cope with social and performance anxiety, to more effectively integrating theory with practice, authors David Ake, Jesse Stewart, Kathryn Ladano, Chris Stover, Howard Spring, and Gabriel Solis detail their approaches to teaching improvisation—and to improvisational teaching.

Section two, “Histories, Institutions, Practices,” focuses more specifically on the challenges and rewards involved in introducing improvisation as a key curricular theme in a variety of institutional contexts, particularly the category of institution that is of greatest interest to many of our readers, college and university music departments. Chapters by Parmela Attariwala, Peter Schubert and Max Guido, Vincent P. Benitez, Scott Currie, Tanya Kalmanovitch, and William Parker remind us of long-neglected improvisatory traditions within the Western Art Music canon, show us how to use improvisation to train students to compose and perform a wide range of musical genres and idioms in a conservatory setting, interrogate established canons and methods, and describe how an improvisational pedagogy forces us to tear down the structural and epistemological divisions between the institutional music subdisciplines of performance, theory, composition, musicology, and ethnomusicology.

The third and final section, “Improvisation and Community Engaged Pedagogy,” features essays and stories from David Dove, Matt Swanson and Patricia Shehan Campbell, Ajay Heble and Jane Bunnett, Mark Laver, Mark V. Campbell, and George Lipsitz—musicians, scholars, and educators who have worked to bring improvisation outside of the traditional academic milieux by establishing (or collaborating with) accessible improvisation-based music programs in underserved communities, by working with children and adults with special needs, and by breaking boundaries between pedagogy and performance, classroom and community. Collectively, these authors call for practice-based methods that offer students visceral experiences of theoretical concepts, outward-looking approaches that take students out of the academy and into direct contact with community teachers and vernacular knowledges, and a pedagogy of discomfort that refuses to allow students, teachers, or administrators to settle into customary habits, easy biases, or familiar hierarchies. They destabilize the conventional understanding of “outreach” as a unidirectional flow of knowledge from the inside of an academic institution to the outside, positing instead a dialogical engagement that coheres around reciprocal exchanges of teaching and learning.

Improvisation in Context

Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom builds on work associated with two large-scale research initiatives (Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice, and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation), and brings to the pages of this book some contributions that initially emerged during a three-day summit in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, on Pedagogy and Community Impact. This event, held in May 2013 under the auspices of the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice project, brought together performers, educators, and researchers who have sought to incorporate improvisation into the content and method of their teaching practices in order to compare strategies and experiences.

It’s worth noting that, over the course of the last decade or so, and in no small measure as a result of the two large-scale research initiatives noted above—initiatives that have resulted in a peer-reviewed journal, annual conferences across multiple sites, a book series, the training, mentoring, and placement of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows—we’ve seen the emergence of critical studies in improvisation as a new interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry. We’ve also seen how growing interest in this field has sparked a transformed understanding of the artistic, social, and pedagogical implications of improvisational practices. In many respects, the growing recognition of this new field bears striking similarities to the growth of another recently emergent and adjacent field, performance studies. In the introduction to their edited collection Teaching Performance Studies, Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer point out that “over the past three decades, the record of transformations [with regard to performance studies] can be seen in scholarly and artistic conferences, public performances, university classrooms, the actions of tenure and promotion committees, and the archive of print and electronic material.”⁸ They note that performance studies “has achieved standing in scholarly organizations; its presence is evidenced in scholarly publications and performances, and it increasingly can be seen in the curricula of colleges and universities both in the United States and abroad.”⁹ Something similar, we would argue, can now be said about critical studies in improvisation.

Indeed, the links between the two fields—performance studies and critical studies in improvisation—may run deeper, as Linda Park-Fuller implies in her chapter, “Improvising Disciplines: Performance Studies and Theatre,” in the Teaching Performance Studies volume. Taking up the ways in which the field of performance studies is “shifting, transforming, metamorphosing—in my hands, in my mind, in its relationship to my department, my university, and the world,”¹⁰ Park-Fuller uses the metaphor of improvisation “to discuss pedagogic aspects of our work at the disciplinary level … at the local level … and at the most essential level of classes and activities.”¹¹ Exploring “performance studies as a postmodern, improvisational discipline, as an institutional course of study, and as a teaching philosophy, subject, and tool,” she argues for a notion of performance studies “as an improvisational method of pedagogy—a method of thought, a method of building curriculum, academic decision making, and teaching/learning, and most of all, a method of service.”¹² Her claim is that “the concept of improvisation provides one way of imagining our work [in performance studies] as liberating yet accountable, active and interactive, inclusive yet distinguishing, artistic, and political. Its positive connotations of inspiration, collaboration, spontaneity, freedom-in-structure, and creation-through-performance are … compelling to me as a way to explain ‘what’ it is that I do and teach and love.”¹³

Another productive area of overlap, as evidenced in many of the chapters in this volume, occurs with the theory and practice of critical pedagogy. Indeed, the legacy of work in critical pedagogy has significantly informed how m...